


760°C

by Sjukdom



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Dark, Gore, Heavy Angst, M/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-11
Updated: 2016-07-11
Packaged: 2018-07-23 00:34:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7459695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sjukdom/pseuds/Sjukdom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bones burn at 760°C.</p>
            </blockquote>





	760°C

Bones burn at 760°C.

The flames in the chimney rise higher as Oswald stirs them with a poker, shoving it deeper into the coals. They shimmer with yellow glow, then it turns orange, then red - brighter and brighter as the temperature goes up, until the red glow becomes crimson as if the flames are devouring darkness that lurks around. The heat pulsates inside the chimney like a giant invisible organ, its waves as burning hot as fresh blood pumping out of a wound. Sitting in front of the fire, Oswald feels the same sticky sweat on his forehead, the physical sign of the thrill that follows the sight of the warm living fluid spraying all over you in tiny red dots.

Only the heat that blood has passes quickly. The longer it keeps on coming out the colder your body gets. And the longer the fire is burning the hotter it becomes, so similar, so different. Your blood feeds you, you feed the fire. To make it all last longer. So similar, so different.

Oswald remembers his notorious meal and laughs quietly, quietly because the flames are roaring and raging, demanding their meal. He will feed them now. He will feed them profoundly. Though it’s always too little, it’s always not enough.

Oswald looks back, cheeks reddened by the closeness of the flames. His gaze is met by Grace's glassy orbs, half-hidden under her heavy eyelids. The things that were her eyes now have the color of a dead fish’s scale and a dead fish's amount of emotions in them. The fear is gone. The panic is gone. The pain is gone from them. Too bad these feelings left her body along with her blood without any trace and without any chance of coming back.

Too bad he couldn’t see it all again in her eyes as he was not so gently detaching the head from the rest of her body, rotting flesh ripping apart under his tools almost on its own. Occasionally Oswald glanced into these dead, pale, expressionless objects, but found nothing. And when he put her head on the table to watch how he dealt with the rest of her carcass there was nothing, too. Now the pathetic pieces of slime inside her eye sockets are catching the flickers of the flames, but even they can’t do anything about the grayness that swallowed the irises, the pupils, the whites, turning everything into one colorless mass.

The heat makes everything tremble around Oswald, the walls, the floor, his legs, her legs with a web of varicose veins under her skin, severed limbs turned into the food for the flames. Oswald grabs one of them and takes a good look at it before shoving it inside the greedy toothless hot mouth of the chimney. White bone is protruding from the naked flesh. The leg was chopped off too carelessly. Is the fire hot and hungry enough to digest it?

Not enough. Never enough.

***

Bones burn at 760°C.

Ed’s head is spinning, various facts circling inside it like a swarm of insects finally set free. It feels like his mind was released at the same time he walked out of the ward. It feels like his mind was locked inside its own special cage as secure as the one his body was held in. The word of Hugo Strange was the key that let him go freely into the gloomy corridors of Arkham’s monster zoo. Ed feels his mind unrolling, twisting and turning as it regains its usual state. For he is in a cage no more, neither in the ward-shaped one nor in the cell reserved for monsters. He is neither a sick patient nor an experimental semi-human being. He is above everyone and everything.

As usual.

He goes around the basement, looking and touching everything he can reach, his now free mind hungry for impressions other than his ward’s surroundings and his own body. It's devouring signals from his perceptive organs, it's chewing on the feeling of textures and temperatures he gathers with his fingertips. Edward stops, his eyes fixating themselves on the scenery behind the glass wall, the scenery of the world’s end as imagined by some not so brilliant minds. Flames, so hot even he can feel their breath. The silhouette walking through them like through the shaky veil of a waterfall, breathing out more flames. Scorched bodies scattered around, curled in fetal positions as if in a vast attempt to keep the fire away.

The smell of burning meat can’t reach him, of course, but nevertheless Ed feels it tickling his nostrils. The compilation of everything the fire ate, burned flesh and hair and nails and fat, but in the end it’s all burned meat. The silhouette, the living flesh and the steel of the flamethrower melted together keeps on moving, keeps on burning, though at the first glance there is nothing to burn. Charcoal lumps on the floor can hardly be called human bodies anymore.

Except bones burn at 760°C. Inside the lumps bones are still hidden, bones are still untouched, bones are still outrageously white. The flames the silhouette produces are not hot enough to burn them into nothing.

It’s always not enough. Never enough.

***

_A spark._

When they met for the first time, it was warm and nice. Outside, on the streets. Inside, in the hall of Gotham City Police Department. Deeper inside Ed’s body, when he dared to contact Oswald. He looked irritated. He asked Ed to leave. But not instantly. He even listened to his riddle - most people turned their backs and went away laughing at him, when he didn’t even finish pronouncing the last word of a riddle. And so it was nice. He was proud he dared to approach this important and dangerous man and kept on smiling even after being turned down again.

The warmth found a place inside him and stayed, waiting for a chance to grow into the heat.

When they first met, it was warm outside on the streets and inside, in the hall of GCPD. Oswald, however, felt coldness flowing down his throat, making his voice even more hoarse, numbing his vocal cords and lungs with the icy anesthesia of embarrassment and anger. By refusing to accept his invitation Jim performed a surgery on his ability to speak and to breathe with a skill of an experienced master. The instrument, his invitation, the scalpel turned against him was lying in the trash bin. No more use for it as it served its purpose perfectly, robbing Oswald of any warmth he collected while walking to the GCPD under so welcoming and deceitful sun.

As if to mock him in his pathetic state, a weird man approached him like a too vivid hallucination constructed by anesthetics. Although for merely a hallucination the man was too chatty and sadly, sadly physically present and three-dimensional. Oswald could see his chest heaving with every meaningless word, his purposeful stare behind his glasses getting more intense with each blink. He felt the warmth radiating from him as he closed the space between them step by step and hated him for melting his cold mask with it. However unpleasant this mask was, it helped him to hold his face still with its cold threads. And now the mask threatened to melt and give a way to everything Oswald was feeling now.

So he told the man to back away, which he did with a smile never leaving his lips and eyes. He did, but the warmth stayed inside Oswald, waiting for a chance to grow and spread and become the heat.

_A candle._

Cold it was in the woods at night. Cold was Oswald’s skin and clothes, soaked in icy sweat as Ed took his limp body into his arms. But hot was the blood that was escaping him through the wound in his shoulder, that was flowing all over Edward’s hands. This was this thing with the blood - however hot it was, it left only coldness behind it. Empty veins, stiff muscles and hollow eyes. And no warmth could be breathed into this coldness anymore, no fire could be lit, if the moment had passed.

Ed looked at the blood on his palms, the warmth he and Oswald shared at their first encounter still dwelling there, washing over his skin in tiny red streams and knew for certain he would never let it pass.

Cold it was in the woods and even colder was Oswald’s body from the inside. The body he was born in now felt like ill-fitting clothes, uncomfortable to move in, to breath in, to live in. The alien thing inflicting only pain. The wound on his shoulder was a dark red flower in his buttonhole, a nice thing to decorate this horrible costume.

Oswald rose. Oswald stumbled hearing a sound. Oswald fell to the ground, the flower of pain digging its roots deeper into him and sucking the rest of the warmth from him, the rest of the life from him. Oswald begged, not sure if the man he was seeing and hearing, seeing his lanky long shape, hearing his breaths ragged by the shock, that this man was not an illusion, a cold mirage of a frozen desert.

He had had this feeling before. He had felt this warmth before. Only then he had wished the man was a mirage, but he proved himself real. Now Oswald prayed that he was real, that he wasn't a mirage. He couldn’t see his face clearly, but something in his movements as he closed his arms around Oswald, something in the rhythm of his breathing reminded him about the encounter at GCPD Oswald thought was gone and forgotten as an insignificant and useless event.

And the temperature. The temperature of his body was the same.

And this last thought before he blacked out proved itself to be true a bit later.

_A fire._

Oswald pretended to remember Ed only when he told him who he was. But secretly he had already known. The warmth told him, the warmth that washed over him as Ed leaned forward to inject him with more painkillers, to refresh bandages on his shoulders or simply to offer him some water. As it had been before, Oswald felt it from the distance. As it would be from now on, Oswald felt it right next to himself, so close, skin to skin, cheek to cheek, tongue to tongue. As it had always meant to be, according to Edwards words.

Oswald discovered that Ed’s warmth was different depending on the circumstances as he was slowly becoming familiar with his body. His breath had the hottest temperature when he was blowing it over the head of Oswald’s cock, the breath as hot as the desert wind as it caressed his exposed sensitive skin under his pink lace curtain, already wet with drops of pre-cum. And Oswald wanted it to become even more wet, bucking his hips slightly towards Ed’s half-opened mouth, teasing him with the heat Oswald knew could be found there, in the cradle of the breath that now tickled his aroused flesh.

Edward knew that Oswald’s breath had the hottest temperature when he was exhaling into his face with a long moan, clutching Ed’s shoulders with both palms as Edward slowly and carefully pushed his cock inside him, where it was even hotter in the tight embraces of his muscles. He already studied the way Oswald’s body contracted and relaxed, greeting his tongue first, then his fingers, but for a reason even Ed’s mind couldn’t process over it felt entirely different now as he was thrusting deeper into his hole, his arms squeezing Oswald’s raised hips harder with each movement of his own.

The warmth that they had presented each other without any conscious intention to do so, the warmth they kept for so long now had finally burst into the burning heat. Unable to keep it inside any longer, they shared it generously, breathing it out, leaving it in traces of saliva upon each other’s bodies, letting it out in white-hot streams of semen.

They thought it would stay this way for a long time, but without feeding even the hottest flames could extinguish. They thought their time together had been good enough, even when they had to split their ways. The fire they had lit was fading day by day, but it had been good enough in its time anyway.

But, of course, it’s always not enough. It’s never enough.

***

The fire in the chimney feasts on the disgusting carcass of the disgusting bitch, biting on her skin and flesh, enjoying them until they are gone. Grace is watching her so well-treated expensive body disappearing, but there’s no single emotion on her face. She doesn’t even wrinkle her nose at the odor of decomposing flesh being burned. The bright side of being just a severed head. Not that Oswald is wrinkling his nose himself. The stench doesn’t bother him in the slightest.

Her bones don’t burn. They are getting black, they are cracking in the flames, but they don’t burn.

Not enough.

The silhouette with the flamethrower, a young woman that doesn’t look human anymore is trying desperately to make the bones of her victims burn. The flesh is gone and Ed finds a strange peace in it. But the refusal of bones to burn unsettles him. He even raises his hand to knock on the glass and offer the inhuman arsonist his advice, but she doesn’t hear.

Not enough.

Flames in the chimney are licking Grace’s bones helplessly. Flames that belong to the arsonist are gnawing on unknown bodies with no effect. They are not enough.

Never enough. We have never had enough, they think along, looking at the futile combat before them, the fire against the bones.

Bones burn at 760°C.

But the next time we meet we’ll make the heat go up to the whole thousand degrees.


End file.
